Embrash - More dumbass outsourcing
Embrash - More dumbass outsourcing
We bought a bed for the kids yesterday. It was the second time we went to the big “I-wanna-be-IKEA” store so choosing the bed took about 5 minutes. Buying the bed on the other hand took about 20 minutes.
The nice lady at the counter went over to the bed we wanted, wrote down (with a pen and paper) all the pieces we needed (it is one of those customize-your-bed beds), then went over to her computer and started tapping the numbers of the pieces into the computer.
After about 5 minutes of this she taps a few keys and then pulls out the receipt and starts copying off her computer monitor onto the paper. They didn’t have one of the pieces that we needed, so she had to get another form and fill that in as well. We had to sign that form and then she made a photocopy of it.
By this time I was wondering what decade I was living in.
Once she was done writing out the Declaration of Independance, she fumbled around in her drawer and pulled out a nice little round calculator with a flip top, and started doing the math.
Then she entered the numbers back into the computer.
Then came the part when we had to give her our banking information, which she wrote both on the paper and typed into the computer.
Finally we got our carbon copy (I haven’t thought of that word for at least a decade) of the receipt and went to the cash register to pay the first payment.
The clerk took our receipt and… yes, you guessed it… entered the information back into the computer.
This wasn’t a little mom and pop store, but a HUGE and major furniture outlet. I don’t know how many people they employ, but I am sure that I could cut it in half with a simple efficiency audit.
Times like these make me wish I was talking on the phone with a nice man in Bangalore!
January 26th, 2005 at 5:54 pm
Unfortunately at the expense of jobs in your locale.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not some buy American thing. Not by any means. But I’ve thought long and hard about this and I believe two things matter: 1. Local 2. Global. What is absent in my list of important is 3. In between (USA, EU, SEA, etc., anything large and regional). I can never understand why an American for example is willing to get out and march to support the transfer of their jobs by a national or multi-national to another state 500 miles away under the guise of buying American. What exactly are they getting for that outsource? 1. Military 2. Federal Agencies. What are they not getting: 1. Schools, 2. Roads (bear with me, don’t bring up the national highway system, that’s a political tool used to force states to toe the line), 3. Local economic health, 4. Cheaper products (at least not as significantly cheaper as if outsourced overseas.
Well, I guess I can’t go into the whole thing in a comment, but some day I’m going to put this all together, because I think I can fairly convincingly argue that only local and global truly should matter, or at least should come first then close second place respectively with regional a distant third.
I guess I should have clarified because I made it sound like I don’t believe in globalization, when it’s quite the opposite.